London, Mysore: Notes on Digital Meanderings and Otherwise

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London, Mysore: Notes on Digital Meanderings and OtherwisePanel: An Assemblage of Artists/Technologies/City Spaces.Urban Arc, 2018 at IIHS, Bengaluru
andPANEL:Technologies of Aesthetic Imagi/nation. Research Symposium on Digital Transitions in Cultural and Creative Industries in India at Centre for Internet and Society, Delhi.

So when are you coming to London next? S asks me on a call. I find myself making incomprehensible sounds – sounds expressing fatigue, frustration, hopelessness and maybe anger? In 2011 after the tightening of borders I was forced to pack up a life I had built within a community, family, friends, profession in London and move back to India. It was a rupture that was extremely traumatic, a rupture I hadn’t addressed that articulated itself in an impossibility to connect – to a city, to home, to community, to profession. Chancing upon the work of Jacqui Kenny I set out to explore London digitally – the city I was expelled from as I simultaneously started hesitatingly making the first steps to making another city – Mysuru – home. This work while situating itself within a larger framework of photography, authorship, travel and art (Jon Rafman, Michael Wolf, Jacqui Kenny, Doug Rickard) with specific reference to Google Street View also addresses issues around borders and visas and what it might look and feel like for a Global South citizen to revisit a mapped expelled from Global North. The work also addresses traumatic ruptures and the possibility for technology to provide for a space for an assimilation/ingestion/digestion or an abjection of these very ruptures.